Keith Schroeder is the founder and CEO of High Road Craft Ice Cream, Inc., a 2016 Inc. 5000 honoree. He is also a veteran chef, cookbook author and cooking magazine columnist. High Road Craft Ice Cream was started in Atlanta by a group of chefs who made ice cream with exceptional flavor for other chefs to serve in restaurants, hotels and resorts. The company has expanded rapidly, and High Road Craft Ice Cream is now found in grocery stores and specialty food stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Prior to founding High Road Craft Ice Cream in 2010, Schroeder served as an executive chef at a number of resort, catering and hotel brands, including Westin and Marriott. Schroeder becaome the youngest chef to be named Executive Chef of the New England Culinary Institute at age 28. In 2014, Schroeder won a prestigious James Beard Award for penning Mad Delicious, The Science of Making Healthy Food Taste Amazing. Schroeder is a 2010 Executive MBA graduate of the Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University.

After 20 years of sharing her marketing, advertising and design prowess with Fortune 500 companies including Target, The Home Depot and Coca-Cola, Nicki Schroeder is now bringing that experience to her job as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of High Road Craft Ice Cream, the Marietta, Georgia-based business she created with her chef husband, Keith Schroeder.

In her role as COO, Schroeder wears a haberdashery of hats from managing the company’s sales and marketing, overseeing research and development, insuring ingredient procurement and directing the truck transport schedule to creating the product design on each pint. For High Road’s inaugural retail line of ice creams and sorbets, Schroeder even transformed a small restroom into a makeshift photo studio and shot the mouthwatering images for the pints. She is also a savvy multi-tasker.

Now overseeing High Road’s expansion into the ice cream sandwich and single-serve product lines, Schroeder monitors the company’s social media platforms on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram daily for customer feedback. “Our customers remain our most reliable barometer of what we need to be doing next and which flavors are resonating. Their feedback is incredibly important as we grow.”

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Soyini Coke is Managing Principal at Annona Enterprises, a strategic advisory firm that works with business under $100M in annual revenues. The company’s experience and exclusive framework helps its clients plan for success. Annona’s project management skills ensure that its clients assemble the funds, business processes and people to run their businesses more profitably

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